“Fabricated evidence”, actions taken “in a hasty and untimely manner”, “arrogance”: an owner “abused his rights” and wanted to “get rid of a tenant who seeks to assert her rights from the start”. Judge Manon Talbot of the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) does not mince her words towards the owner of several buildings Tristan Desautels. The young man is held responsible for the illegal eviction of a tenant before she even moved into her home and is ordered to pay her more than $14,000.
Paramita Nachampassak described her situation in detail on our pages in April 2021. After signing a lease for 3½ rue Saint-Denis, in the La Petite-Patrie district of Montreal, she understood that the rent had increased from $650 to $1120. Surprised by this increase of more than 70% and dissatisfied with the landlord’s response, she contacted the TAL in the hope of being able to have the rent “fixed”.
The landlord’s father, Daniel Desautels, acknowledges receipt of his request to the Court on April 20, 2021. Three days later, his son Tristan, the largest shareholder of the company Zebra Immobilier, shows up without warning at the home of the tenant’s parents (there where Mme Nachampassak resides) and brings him goods, such as a stepladder and painting equipment.
Between the day she signed her lease and her move in, she had in fact had access to the accommodation to paint and bring certain personal effects. The young woman asks Tristan Desautels to go and recover the rest of her belongings, including a sofa that she bought from the former tenant. “Don’t waste your time with that, the locks are already changed,” he retorts. He also wishes her good luck in finding accommodation, now that she has a TAL file and thanks her for the painting done in the accommodation.
Affirming that a lease had already been signed with another person, he invoked an “error made in good faith” in court, as he had done in our pages.
Judge Talbot, however, concluded that this lease signed with a man named Thomas Legault “is evidence fabricated to elude a fraudulent maneuver by the landlord.” He wanted to “get rid of a tenant who seeks to assert her rights from the start,” she says bluntly, specifying that there is no other possible conclusion.
Neither Thomas Legault nor Mr. Desautels’ spouse, Sandrine Campeau, were called to testify in Court even if the owner’s version was based on this lease.
Other breaches
Paramita Nachampassak says she is “frankly relieved” by this judgment which proves her right “across the board”: “I was still expecting it given that there were a lot of holes in their story. They presented only one piece of evidence without soliciting further testimony,” she said in an interview. The judgment is clear and “explicit”, she finds, congratulating the judge “who did not eat the excuses they presented”.
It still took more than two and a half years between his request for compensation and the TAL’s decision. “It was a process that was extremely long,” she emphasizes. The tenant who was evicted before even moving in had to send a formal notice to be able to recover her personal belongings.
Second lease or not, Tristan Desautels could not “take justice into his own hands,” the judgment also states. He should have contacted the TAL to request the termination of the lease and “above all not act in a hasty and untimely manner as he did”, writes Mme Talbot.
As for the testimonies of Tristan Desautels and his father, the judge noted several contradictions. It was the father who signed the first lease with Thomas, the same day as a virtual tour of the apartment. However, he did not notify his son and his partner (then an employee of the company) until a week later, she notes in particular.
Weeks after this eviction, after verification of the Duty, no other tenant occupied the accommodation. During his testimony on December 7, 2021, more than 7 months later, an occupant of the same building also declared that the accommodation was still uninhabited.
Judge Talbot also insisted on the fact that Tristan Desautels had entered the home unlawfully by entering the accommodation without authorization to remove Ms.me Nachampassak, even if she did not yet live there. He maintained during the hearing that he made a good decision in replacing the locks without notice, and that it was part of their “standard procedure.”
“In the eyes of the Court, the landlord seems to have a poor understanding of his legal and contractual obligations as a landlord and how to behave towards tenants,” she also writes. During the hearing, Tristan Desautels specified that he had more than a hundred tenants.
Following the publication of our report in 2021, other tenants, this time in Sherbrooke, said they were under eviction pressure from Mr. Desautels, who presents himself as manager of the building.
Retired literary critic Jean-Roch Boivin died at age 79 in 2023, a few weeks after undergoing “a most ferocious renoviction,” according to his obituary. His building had been bought the previous year by Modela, whose promoter was then Tristan Desautels.